


Ulvspakken

by PaxVobis



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Abusive Parents, Black Metal, Black Metal References, Brotherhood, Corruption, Dreams and Nightmares, Drep Du Selv, Explicit and Violent Homophobia Referenced, Gen, Homophobic Language, Kvlt, Misogyny, Norsk | Norwegian, Norway (Country), POV Second Person, Preklok, Referenced Historical Hatecrime, Referenced True Crime, Referenced murder, Running Away, Satanism, Team as Family, Teenage Rebellion, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 22:03:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12419151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Toki, barely 14, has fled his family home for Lillehammer.  There, he falls into the company of the frightening black metallers and the difficult Runke Snogge, fresh out of prison.





	Ulvspakken

Ever since coming down to the town, you have been plagued with nightmares.  They are what they are – shadows of a life that’s still so near, that you could see if you stood out on the street and looked into the horizon – and it’s hard, sometimes, between the sheer walls of the basement of Drep Du Selv and the sheer walls when you close your eyes, to tell when you are sleeping and when you are awake.

But the basement has one thing that your nightmares do not, and that is a light.  If you ever question which is real, you only have to turn it on and you will see: concrete walls, the boiler casing with its incessant rattling, a creepy old painting leaned against the wall with the face scratched away, part of Runke’s hoard, and your bedding, just bundled blankets keeping you only barely from the cold concrete floor.  Your guitar leans against the corner, stood up, cracked with rusted strings.  Everything smelling of mildew, your sweat from night terrors, stale from rarely bathing. 

If you leave the light on long enough, someone – usually Runke, but sometimes better, Gylve, Sammath, Kåre – will come down the stairs.  Boot.  By.  Boot.  Step.  Stand at the bottom and call, _Toki.  Go to sleep._   And you’ll turn off the light and drop back down into your blankets and feign death and eventually, eventually, they’ll go away.

For this reason the dark is better, if you’re awake.  As it was before, the darkness allows you to move around in silence.  Wearing your socks only you are noiseless on the concrete floor.  You can use the rattle and whistle of the boiler to cover up each step.  Through into the storage room, where Runke keeps the extra stock, cardboard boxes full of tapes, then stacks of ones he’s hoarded, a huge sleeting pile of old posters dumped flat on top of each other. 

This room is carpeted and although Runke will give you 40 kroner per hour for sorting the new tapes and writing down their names in a book for him, if you touch the old reh-tapes and records, his personal collection, he promises to collect your fingers so that you will never play guitar again.  You touch them anyway, peering at their beautiful covers in the dark.  From their titles, you are learning more English than you ever could have gathered from translations of the Bibel.  _Deathcrush.  Chainsaw Gutsfuck.  Bloodlust and Perversion. Sadist.  Octagon.  Nocturnal Obeisance.  Under A Funeral Moon._   You move your mouth around the English words in the blue darkness, and the words feel good, rounds and daggers, hissing and crooning.  In the store, filing away tapes and records for Runke, you sing along, even when you don’t know what the words mean.

From above in the store, you can hear Runke and his friends drinking and laughing and chatting together well into the night, the smell of cigarette and cannabis smoke tinging the air under the door along with the shaft of yellow light.  You could sit here and listen to them for hours, in Norske, in English.  They are filled with stories of incredible people with incredible names, like Necrofucker and Vobiscum.  Rarely, they have let you stay up to sit with them, awkward in your t-shirt and jeans amongst all their black and bullets with Gylve pushing a beer towards you, smiling, but not without that wolfish humour that says he only shares to laugh at your naïveté.  Teaching you more words in stuttering English across the counter.  _Pussy.  Bitch.  Cunt.  Faggot.  Retard.  Junkie._

Runke sits with his boots up on the counter, talks about Halden, the maximum security prison – all he knew for the last two years before taking over the boarded up Drep Du Selv.  He doesn’t sell much except drugs now, but the passion is there.  There is another Drep Du Selv, in Oslo, where most of his friends come from, but Drep Du Selv was here first, and a man called Øystein, and – others, too.  Now metallers pass through Lillehammer as they tour bars, or to visit their families, or just to drop off tapes and visit Runke, whom they are worried about.  For the most part, they have left Drep Du Selv behind.

You have not quite been able to piece together what Runke was in prison for, but it was not for stabbing a man called Øystein in Oslo twenty-three times, that was someone else who all of them knew and joked darkly about, then grew quiet.  And it wasn’t for stabbing this _rompis_ in Lillehammer, that was Runke’s bandmate who is now in jail, and he laughs cruelly about it.  Though everyone who travels through asks, he did not see them in prison. 

And although Runke is frightening, and his celebration of slaughtering _skiever_ breeds an uneasiness in your gut, you nonetheless know that there is no one who has seen more, is more dangerous, in this town than Runke.  You knew this as soon as you saw him, standing outside his shop and smoking, and looking down his hooked nose at you with fresh scars down his arms and a huge inverted cross hanging about his neck, and you knew that this was where you had to be.  There is no place your family would stay further away from Drep Du Selv, Øystein’s store once, no place more cursed and in bad renown than any place Norwegian black metallers choose to gather in the wake of these murders.  Medieval weapons on the walls.  Runke eyeballing you, an opportunist drawn in himself in a similar way, having seen you every day for the past week as you otherwise hide on the street.  _Kid.  You want a job?_   Though you are weak, though you are just Toki, so long as you are around these men, you are safe.

If you go through the other door in the basement, you are in a pitch black room with a fuse box.  If you stare into the dark long enough, the light that filters down from above causes shapes to loom out of the gloom.  Words, in English, spray painted on the wall in black paint.

**BLACK ME†AL**

In Gylve’s hand.  The T inverted like a turned cross.  And there is nothing that gives you more peace than to see it.

And there will be magazines, that Samath will bring up from Oslo, and you will read them out loud with the fey guy standing by and correcting your English, explaining new words to you.  _Wue wue, good job, Toki._   And there will be a band in them called Dethklok, and you will feel something, a tug.  Knowing that the story you’re reading, about a stabbing, is the same as Runke, the same as Drep Du Selv.  Makes them the most frightening band in this place, Florida, where all the good words come from – _Angel Corpse, Obituary, Dethklok._   Runke doesn’t get it, won’t let you listen to their music.  _Fucking shit, Toki, I didn’t raise you on True Black Metal for you to betray us like this._  

But you start saving your money anyway, and by the time you see the ad, you know enough to read the words on your own.  Guitarist Wanted Dethklok.  And you have saved enough 40 kroners to just beg Kåre for money since Kåre has some money and empty Runke’s till and plead with Gylve for a lift into Oslo behind Runke’s back, since Gylve is _en sleip faen_ and loves to know things that Runke doesn’t, to make him mad in small ways.  And he drives you there, talking to you about wolves and getting married some day - will you? - and Dethklok and this place, America, with your guitar held between your legs and the country, the home you’ll soon be leaving lush in its summer haze out the window.  And the train takes you to the airport, and the airport takes you to Florida.

Tampa.

Dethklok.

And you never feel the need to write or call.  You know they have their eyes on you.  That is what brothers is.

**Author's Note:**

> feels good to write something again! had this in mind for a long, long time.


End file.
